eRain’s Swift 3D is a 3D application with a twist: it has the not unimportant ambition to be simple and powerful at the same time. 3D simple and powerful? Up to version 2, Swift was simple enough, but lacked much of the power of packages as Carrara. Then came version 3; the power began to show through with that version. With version 4, the current generation of the program, Swift 3D has become quite a powerful 3D application for people seeking to create 3D scenes that can easily be exported to Flash and raster image formats.

Of course, Swift 3D is no match for Maya, or even for Carrara Studio. Those programs have been designed with realistic 3D animation and rendering as their primary objective. Swift, on the other hand, has been developed with Flash export capabilities in mind. The 3D power only now shows through clearly. Is it still simple? Compared to Carrara and Maya, it certainly is.

Swift 3D offers a scene editor, a lathe editor, an extrusion editor and a preview render window. It comes with a render engine for vector art, the Ravix III engine, developed by eRain themselves. The raster render engine is called Emo and is also self-developed. Ravix III is pretty powerful. It was used in Carrara and even in Maya. Emo is less powerful, but still able enough to come up with very decent renderings.

Spectacularly new in version 4 is the Advanced Modeler editor. Let’s start with that one. The Advanced Modeler gives an artist the means to edit polygon faces, vertices and edges. In practice this is as easy as selecting the right editor and the right button (an editor is in essence a window in Swift 3D), and dragging selected material so that the basic polygon form changes. The manual calls it the equivalent of clay modeling.

Now you can first draw a sphere in the regular scene editor, then switch to the advanced modeler and drag a nose from the surface, creating a face in a few steps and without using new polygons. It sounds easy and it is easy, once you get the hang of it. I don’t know if it’s me, but I had to try a few times to get to the right vertices before I could create anything decent in the advanced modeler. In my opinion, eRain should have made the editor itself slightly different so that it is easier to select the right vertices, faces, or edges.

In Maya, for example, I find it actually easier to select those elements, and Maya is not my idea of a simple interface.

That being said, advanced modeling inevitably will add to the complexity of Swift 3D, and it’s still all quite simple to use.

Of course, there’s more news to Swift 3D than “just” the Advanced Modeler. For example, Web Assistant is new as well. Web Assistant opens a web page from within Swift 3D, giving you direct access to the Swift 3D web site. If you have an inferiority complex about your 3D skills, it is best to never open this editor at all. eRain proudly presents some of the art people have cooked up on the web with Swift and Flash, and in all honesty: some of it is awesome.

Other new features are seven camera views, a reference grid, undo/redo buttons, an animate button, and a gallery toolbar. All features in the “so-what” category, if you ask me. Still, they do make life easier once more.

More useful is the Save to Gallery capability. If you created a new model that is part of a larger scene, it can be quite useful to save that model to your gallery for later re-use. And if you can share these galleries with others, it becomes even more useful.

There are other new features which are nice to have, some of them which should have been there from day one, but when you look at Swift 3D version 4 it is a huge step forward towards higher end 3D animation. The Ravix III engine does a wonderful job of rendering your art accurately, and you get a lot of control over the render process.

Swift 3D v4 is certainly worth the upgrade. Even if you would consider the less spectacular new features not very valuable, the Advanced Modeler by itself is worth the upgrade price.